I won’t try to respond to all of your arguments. In particular, I
will not comment on your defense of Malthus against Marx and Engels,
since I agree with the reply by Franklin Dmitryev.
Nor will I respond to your more general argument that “too many people”
is a valid explanation for ecological destruction, because the book I’ve co-written with Simon Butler deals in detail with that.

* * *

You open your latest message by objecting to my style, which you
describe as attack rather than discussion. In particular, you object to
my use of words such as “shameful”, “anti-human” and “ethnic cleansing”
to describe the policies advocate by you and deep ecology advocates.

First, let me repeat what I wrote in my first contribution to this
exchange, that I do not question your dedication or sincerity. You have
been a long-time activist in the green movement, and have made many
valuable contributions to our understanding of the crises we face. I do
not view you as an enemy. As you write, within the broad ecosocialist
movement, “there are no traitors, only different views”.

But that doesn’t mean we should soft pedal our differences. If you
were a naïve newcomer to ecosocialist debates, I might have muted my
criticisms and adopted a gentler, more indirect approach. But because I
know you are a knowledgeable and experienced activist and scholar, I
assume that you mean what you write, and that you have thought through
the implications of your statements. Precisely because I respect your
experience and influence in the green left, I have tried to state my
disagreements clearly and firmly. None of my words were meant as
personal insults, and none should be interpreted that way.

I can’t find that I used the word “shameful”, but I did indeed
describe deep ecology as “anti-human” and I did compare the call for
wilderness depopulation to “ethnic cleansing”. I believe those words
accurately describe the ideas I was criticising.

Is deep ecology 'anti-human'?

Imagine a political group that sets out to solve problems in central
Africa. After much discussion, it adopts an eight-point program. Six of the
points are broad philosophical or ethical generalisations that could be
interpreted in various ways. Two points stand out because they are
concrete: they say that malaria is Africa’s biggest problem, so
reducing the number of cases of malaria has to be a priority.

I think it would be reasonable to describe such a group as anti-malaria.

Now let’s look at deep ecology. There are many currents within it, but the fundamental basis of agreement is the Eight Point Platform
written by Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984. Some deep ecologists
add other points to their personal lists, but all accept the Eight
Point Platform.

Six of the eight points are broad philosophical or ethical statements
that could be interpreted in many ways. Point 6, for example, says that
policies must be changed, and the result will be a situation that is
“deeply different from the present”. Most of the other points are
equally vague.

Only two identify a concrete problem and a concrete solution:

4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is
compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The
flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population.

5. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

Problem: Humans are harming the non-human world, and the problem is rapidly getting worse. Solution: Reduce the number of people.

Population reduction has been called the “litmus test” of deep
ecology. The one concrete position supported by all deep ecology
advocates, left or right, religious or secular, is that the number of
humans on Earth must be drastically reduced. How this is to be achieved
is usually not specified, but it is difficult to imagine a humane
approach that could produce the desired contraction before the “die-off”
that most deep ecologists think is inevitable in the near future.

So in exactly the same way as our imaginary Africa group is anti-malaria, deep ecology is anti-human. I
cannot think of a more accurate term for an ideology that views people
as the problem and reducing population as the solution.

What about ethnic cleansing?

In my your article, “Pachamama and Deep Ecology”, you wrote that if
the Bolivian leaders were sincere, they would “press for the withdrawal
of humanity from large tracts of the earth, [and] … demand that such
vacated tracts are allowed to again become wilderness. It ought to
demand that large parts of the forests, savannahs, rivers and swamps are
not changed anymore.”

As I’m sure you know, this is a variation of a proposal made in the
1980s by the right-wing deep ecology advocate Dave Foreman, a founder of
the US group EarthFirst!, who wrote: “The only hope of the Earth is
to withdraw huge areas as inviolate natural sanctuaries from the
depredations of modern industry and technology. Move out the people and
cars. Reclaim the roads and the plowed lands.” It’s relevant to note
that at that time, Foreman also favoured reducing population by denying
food aid to Ethiopian famine victims and banning all immigration to the
United States.

I responded to your version of this proposal by pointing out that
such a plan would inevitably target the people who now live in the
“forests, savannahs, rivers and swamps”, including Indigenous people. It
would require the removal of hundreds of millions of people from their
homes, and that, I said, might better be called ethnic cleansing.

In reply, you say that you would oppose the expulsion of Indigenous
people from the wilderness. When you called for removing “humanity”, you
only meant “the civilized occupiers”. That would be a welcome (if
terminologically outrageous) correction, but it appears that you limit
the term “Indigenous people” to the small number of hunter-gatherer
peoples who live totally outside the capitalist economy, such as the
Yanomami of Brazil.

Among the “civilized occupiers” whom you do want to expel, you
specifically describe “rice farmers and fishermen” in Bengal. Presumably
you would also include peasants, fishers and subsistence workers in
other countries of the global South as well. Such people may not be
“Indigenous” by your definition, but they are among the poorest people
in the world.

As I wrote, “the primary victims of capitalism and imperialism would become the primary victims of deep ecology”.

Obviously, I used the shocking words “ethnic cleansing” to stress the
inhumanity of such a project. Nevertheless, my dictionary defines the
term as “the systematic elimination of an ethnic group or groups from a
region or society, as by deportation, forced emigration, or genocide”. I
think that describes any program that removes humans from large parts
of the Earth, even when the objective is to recreate a mythical
wilderness.

This is not an abstract question

I asked how much population contraction is needed. You replied that
scientists are studying the problem of carrying capacity and ecological
footprint, and so, “on the basis of the results of their research, and
with resolve, reasonable decisions could be made if the people in power
had the will”.

Really? How can you responsibly advocate population
reduction as a top priority for the world if you have no idea, not even
an opinion, about how many is too many? What if the scientists conclude
(as many already have) that there is no objective test for human
carrying capacity, and no ideal human population?

Then I asked, regarding your proposal for depopulating wilderness
areas, “Who will decide which human beings must leave the places where
they and their ancestors have lived for millennia? Who will enforce the
compulsory migrations, and how will they do it?”

Once again, you avoided the question:

When an eco-socialist government (and perhaps also such a
society) is in place, the citizens who have elected such a government
will know what to do and they will do it. In the time before that, i.e.
in the transition period, a policy of strong material incentives and
disincentives would be necessary (see my book).

If this were an abstract question that could wait until the worldwide
victory of ecosocialism, or at least until the “transition period”, we
could debate it at leisure. But proposals to drive Indigenous and other
people out of their homelands on environmental grounds are not
intellectual games – they are really being implemented today.
Most notably, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation
(REDD+) program, led by the World Bank and supported by various UN
agencies, encourages governments to generate carbon credits by
preserving supposedly pristine forests.

As justice activists point out, the losers in this are Indigenous and
other forest peoples. Their lands are being seized, their access to
traditional food and shelter denied, their spiritual and cultural
practices destroyed. From Kenya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Papua New Guinea, Mexico and Indonesia, to name only a few, people have
been expelled and arrested for using resources on their lands, in the
name of slowing greenhouse gas emissions thousands of miles away. (See Carbon Trade Watch,Key Arguments Against REDD.)

I’m sure you’ll reply that this isn’t what you intended.
Unfortunately, as the proverb says, the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. Proposals such as yours can easily give credence to
imperialist schemes such as REDD.

US ecologist William Cronon writes,

protecting the rain forest in the eyes of First World
environmentalists all too often means protecting it from the people who
live there. Those who seek to preserve such "wilderness" from the
activities of native peoples run the risk of reproducing the same
tragedy—being forcibly removed from an ancient home—that befell American
Indians. Third World countries face massive environmental problems and
deep social conflicts, but these are not likely to be solved by a
cultural myth that encourages us to "preserve" people-less landscapes
that have not existed in such places for millennia. At its worst, as
environmentalists are beginning to realize, exporting American notions
of wilderness in this way can become an unthinking and self-defeating
form of cultural imperialism. (The Trouble with Wilderness)

Similarly, proposals to reduce population have concrete, often
horrifying, consequences. As Marxist geographer David Harvey warns:

The lives of hundreds of thousands of real people have been destroyed
by well-meaning Western programs meant to save them from
overpopulation. In case after case, supposedly humanitarian campaigns to
reduce birth rates have led to mass coerced sterilisation and other
human rights violations. Once again, good intentions aren’t just
insufficient, they can be deadly.

In short, for ecosocialists to support wilderness clearances and
population reduction would place us on the wrong side of some of the
most important environmental and social justice struggles taking place
in the world today.

If ecosocialists truly want to build a movement than can build a
better world, we must be absolutely clear: people are not the problem,
and reducing the number of people is not a solution.

Sincerely,
Ian Angus
Editor, Climate and Capitalism

This is an ongoing discussion. The following contributions have been posted on Climate and Capitalism to date: